SF Gate: Calif.'s protected desert is filled with private land. One group is trying to change that.
When driving through the Mojave National Preserve, one of the largest national park units in the contiguous United States, it’s easy to imagine that the entire vast desert landscape is a single piece of giant, untouched wilderness.
But in reality, the 1.6 million acre preserve is dotted with privately owned parcels, each with various levels of human impact. On some sites, people live on their private land, surrounded by protected desert wilderness. Thousands of acres are still used privately for cattle ranching, while other parcels may hold the remnants of a former mining operation. And still others have been taken over by nature, with the boundary between the private parcel and the national preserve indiscernible to the naked eye.
These types of parcels—called “private inholdings”—are relatively common on public lands. When a landscape receives a designation as a national monument or national park, that doesn’t mean the federal government confiscates all of the privately owned land within those boundaries. Instead, the existing ownership and previous uses can largely continue on these private parcels, even as the surrounding land is protected from development or other potentially harmful uses.
The Mojave National Preserve was designated relatively recently back in 1994, meaning there was over a century between when mining claims started in the area and when the land was protected. At the time of the preserve’s designation, these piecemeal properties totaled 85,000 acres, all remnants of decades of mining, homesteading and railroad development in the desert.
For the past twenty years, the Mojave Desert Land Trust has focused on steadily purchasing these private inholdings and handing them off to the National Park Service, one small parcel at a time. Last year, the land trust acquired an 800-acre property in the Mojave National Preserve, the nonprofit's largest single acquisition in the preserve to date.